Last year, I took a promotion at work which meant I would be managing a few people and also involved with/overseeing a number of long term projects. As I've learned how to manage people, I've also learned that my previous methods for note taking are insufficient for what I'm doing and I'm losing track of things in my paper notebooks.

My employer has offered to buy me a new laptop but I'm actually pretty satisfied with my current laptop, so I've been doing some research into e-ink tablets which I think will help me stay more organized while also allowing me to take notes by hand (my preference) rather than typing things into a Google doc as I've been doing for my one on one meetings.

I don't have any experience with this technology and no way that I can get any hands on experience before buying something, so I'd love to hear from anyone who has used something like this, and especially if there's anything I need to consider that I haven't thought of.

My use cases:

• note taking / digital organization
• online reading (I run literary magazines and our submissions come in through an online system, and there's no convenient way to download them as pdfs to read offline, so having access to a web browser is important)
• access to Google Drive ideally so I can get to my notes from my desktop or laptop
• it'll be used at my desk or on my couch in full light, so no backlight or front light is not an issue

One of my coworkers has a remarkable tablet but he told me it's been less useful for him than he thought. In my research, this seems to be too limited for my uses.

The Onyx Boox Go 10.3 seems to be what would work best for me but I've also read a lot of warnings about their poor customer service so I'm a bit hesitant.

I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.

I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:

• tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
• lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
• Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
• Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
• Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
• Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".

Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.

Hi and welcome to this post

I was just wondering if anyone else (besides me) is currently interested in the indie web and also in extension 88x31 Buttons.

I have a small (and very much in-progress) website that I mostly coded myself. I started sometimes 2 years ago, so in 2024. And through that time it has gone through so many iterations. My site only consists of HTML and CSS and some minimal JavaScript. So I was just wondering if anyone also has an interest in the indie web and more importantly also has some buttons?

The idea or goal with this post was to just find some more people to add as neighbors because I find it somewhat scary to just ask people out of the blue or email them.

I also made my own if anyone wants to link it to their site please let me know.

This is my button:
https://postimg.cc/xqYQ8dJr

<a href="https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org"><img src="https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org/button-luna.png" alt="Luna's Button"/></a>

I guess the link to the site is this:
https://luna-uwu.nekoweb.org/ (I think i posted it before)

I guess that's about it. I hope you have a nice time of day wherever you are.

Do you think it is ethical?
Should robots be remotely controlled at all times or should they be automated?
Who do you think should be held responsible if a robot accidentally commits a war crime?
Do you think war would be more frequent if there were no humans fighting?
Also a more general question: what do you think is the future of robots?

With Google search going AI-first, I'm really interested in trying it out. But I don't know anyone IRL who's used it.

Kagites of Tildes, what do you think of the search subscription product? Do you find the privacy satisfactory? And for bonus points, how do you find the anti-AI ("slop-stop") features?

Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).

Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.

But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.

So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?

(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)

I recently realized that many of my favorite gadgets are basically "new" versions of old technology.

• I use Sony Xperia 1VII, with a headphone jack, side mounted fingerprint, no screen cutout, stock Android. It's running the latest Snapdragon chip, however, and the camera hardware is better than the current iPhone (doesn't mean the software is better)
• My favorite smartwatch is Pebble Time. My rePebble Time 2 is on the way. I'm currently using a Garmin, but I'm not exactly happy with it.
• My keyboard is a Niz EC84. The default keycap looks like my keyboard in middle school and it is just perfect right out of the box (except I should've got the 45g one). As a Topre clone, it bounces with rubber domes. I don't like mechanical as the tactile point is not right at the very top of the curve. It also supports hardware mouse key and Bluetooth which is useful when you're working with multiple machines. (Sadly no QMK in this layout)
• When I was buying my PC I couldn't find a single good modern case (i.e. with USB C ports in the front panel) that doesn't have any glass like old school PC. Luckily, Fractal North was just released back then and I immediately preordered.
• I suppose the ThinkPad line may fit into this aesthetically, but it's not exactly the same as it was in IBM era. I heard that the Chinese are making new board for the old ThinkPad chassis though.

I feel like this is an underserved market - why can't they just give me the same phone/computer I have but with the latest technological advancements. Sure, it'd be niche and many people will complain at the price, but at least there is a choice.

Does anyone have other favorite new old school tech they wanted to recommend?

I love writing, it's one of the most human things about humanity. It's communication, art and sharing all at once. It's been fundamental to culture and progress for 1000's of years.

LLMs are, in a way, really good at writing. They have the larger part of human creative output distilled into their weights. So it was inevitable that more and more people would start publishing articles and blog posts written (all or in part) by AI agents.

I don't like it but I accept it, there really isn't anything I can do about it. What I was hoping, though, is that high signal to noise ratio places on the internet (Tildes among them) would reject it and we could go on consuming 100% organic prose, at least for a while.

And for while that's exactly what happened. In techy places like Hacker News, AI posts were quickly flagged and downvoted into oblivion. At Tildes they mostly didn't show up at all, or if they did I missed them.

That seems to be ending though. Now I see agent written pieces on the front page of HN with 100's of comments. There's always a highly upvoted comment pointing out that the piece is slop, but you have to scroll to find it.

The reason I use HN as an example is that it's full of people with extensive experience using AI agents who are in a position to tell if something is slop. And it looks like the larger part of readers (or at least commenters) can't tell the difference anymore. If that's true at HN, it's going to be true everywhere.

It is getting harder to tell when something is slop, people are post editing, handwriting intros and getting better at prompting to remove obvious LLM tells. But if you have any practical experience with these tools, it's still pretty easy to tell. Somewhere during post training certain patterns end up getting heavily favored. Interestingly, many of them happen across all of the frontier models. Em-dashes are the most famous but there are so many more. Most are rhetorical tricks or formatting patterns rather than punctuation.

Reading LLM prose, many of the tropes don't stand out at first, instead they land as strong writing. But after you see them repeat enough times they start to become obvious. Even putting the tropes aside, the hallmark of a lot of LLM writing is that it's more rhetoric than substance. Low signal, lots of noise.

I don't have a solution, it's starting to look like many (maybe most) people aren't going to be able to tell when they're consuming something that required minimal thought by the "author" who prompted the AI. Which is sad because, up until now, we could assume that, when we read something, someone cared enough to put time and mental bandwidth into creating it. That's become increasingly less true.

I suppose this post is me feeling wistful for the internet we used to have, written exclusively by humans. I continue to hope that people will reject slop at places like Tildes, but in order for them to do that they have to be able to identify it. Maybe people will get better at that, there is definitely a point where you've consumed enough slop that you can smell it from a mile away. But of course the slop is going to keep getting harder to detect.

I don't want to go as far as to say that slop will take over the internet, I think (hope) that people will keep wanting to read organic, human, writing. And that as a result we'll come up with strategies and solutions to support that.

It's a weird time. Right now every LLM blog post and article that goes viral is signalling to the prompter, and anyone watching who can tell what's happening, that there is demand for slop. And of course with demand comes profit. I think we're at the beginning of a steep curve.